1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to improvements in software and hardware design verification. More particularly, this invention relates to methods and systems for centrally managing the composition and execution of test suites for verification of different hardware and software.
2. Description of the Related Art
The meanings of acronyms and certain terminology used herein are given in Table 1:
TABLE 1APIApplication programming interfaceCLDCConnected, limited device configuration. CLDC issuitable for devices with 16/32-bit RISC/CISCmicroprocessors/controllers, having as littleas 160 KB of total memory available.HTTPHyperText Transfer ProtocolIDIdentifierIPInternet ProtocolJ2EEJava 2 Enterprise EditionJ2MEJava 2 Micro EditionJ2SEJava 2 Standard EditionJADJava application descriptorJARJava archiveJDTSJava Device Test Suite execution frameworkMIDletA MIDP applicationMIDPMobile information device profile. A set of JavaAPIs, which, together with the CLDC, provides acomplete J2ME application runtime environmenttargeted at mobile information devices.Plat-An underlying system on which applicationformprograms can run on a computing device. Ittypically includes an operating system, and caninclude supporting hardware, which may be eitherstandardized, or customized for a particularcomputing device.
MIDP is defined in Mobile Information Device Profile (JSR-37), JCP Specification, Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, Ver 1.0a (Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif., December 2000). MIDP builds on the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) of the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) (available from Sun Microsystems Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.). The terms Sun, Sun Microsystems, Java, J2EE, J2ME, J2SE, and the Sun logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States of America and other countries. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective companies. A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any one of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
Tools have been developed in recent years to aid in the design verification of hardware and software systems, for example software suites, hardware circuitry, and programmable logic designs. In order to assure that the design complies with its specifications, it is common to generate a large number of input or instruction sequences to assure that the design operates as intended under a wide variety of circumstances. In general, test systems produce a report indicating whether tests have been passed or failed, and, in some cases may even indicate a module that is estimated to be faulty.
Conventionally, to test a device under development (such as a mobile information device), or to test software designed to run on such a device, a developer connects the device to an appropriate test system. The target device under test may be connected to the test system either directly or via a communication emulator. The developer selects a battery of test programs to run on the target device while monitoring its behavior. Running the complete battery of tests can commonly take many hours or even days. This problem is particularly acute in testing low-end computing devices, such as cellular telephones and other mobile information devices, which have limited computing power and memory resources. Thus, testing on the target device can become a serious bottleneck in the development cycle.